#C3S2015 Trip Report – Day 0

After an excellent dinner and many coffees, our first session started at 9pm (yes! they are working us hard already). We received a warm welcome from Olaf Meaneel (TUT) to the first ever cyber security summer school (C3S2015). Dr Parag Pruthi kicked off proceedings with his talk titled “Advancing big data analytics – cyber defence solutions”.

Parag asked “When was the first cyber war?” The answer: in 1982, during the cold war, the CIA attacked the flow control software for soviet serbian gas pipeline. Our networks are even more fragile. Example of Iran hijacking US drone and some excellent clips from the IT crowd. Breaching systems is fast, discovery is slow and recovery is very slow. We always blame ‘dave’, we aren’t good at protecting against human error. Intrusion detection systems are not reliable, 1% false positive rate gives a trust levels of .19%.

We researchers are disconnected from the real world, we make simplifying assumptions, design a solution and test in simulation against the assumptions. Parag motivates engineering from real world network. He details the challenges in collecting petabytes of data, storage, compression, retrieval, processing and evaluating.

Parag key message was that big data provides us with near perfect information for intrusion detection.

Q: Is you approach limited in time, we must collect data and anaylsis before we can react?
A: Correct, we still have real people watching data visualisation, like a security guard watch CCTV, but they are not an order of magnitude faster then they where before.